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Lizette Woodworth Reese was a late 19th century poet and teacher from Baltimore who wrote extensively about the seasons. It would seem from her sonnet, April in Town, that daffodils and rain were as common then in the eastern USA, as they are here and now – although there were daffodils in the village in January this year.

This is Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18, and parts of it have featured in these Notes once before – in a comment on how unpredictable the weather in the month of May can be. Seeing the whole sonnet as set out here reveals that it’s not about the weather (or the Summer) at all, but about love, and poetry. Who will you recite it to?

Henry Howard, the Earl of Surrey, was first cousin to both Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard. After Thomas Wyatt introduced sonnets into English, it was Howard who gave them the rhyming structure that Shakespeare then used. But these were dangerous times, even for a writer of sonnets about unrequited love, and he was beheaded for treason in 1547.

Du Fu (712 – 770) was a Tang Dynasty poet. Here he is writing here about the very wet autumn of 754 in what is now the Chinese megacity of Xi’an.

Lamenting Autumn Rains

Blustrous winds, unending rains, autumn of chaos.

The four seas, eight directions one solid cloud:

Horses going, cows coming, who can make out for sure?

Muddy Jing River, clear Wei, how to tell them apart?

From grain tips, ears sprouting, millet heads turned to black;

No word of how farmers, farmers’ wives are faring.

In the city, exchange a bed of quilt, get a meagre peck of grain –

Just agree, don’t argue over which is worth more!

We have had weather like this in England in the past. The summer of 1314 was wet and cool and the harvest poor. In May 1315, it began to rain and continued for 15 months with widespread crop failures and food prices doubling between by midsummer. It wasn’t till 1325 that food supply returned to normal. Then the Black Death came and wiped out 40% of England’s people. The young were especially vulnerable, just as they are to today’s pandemics.

It has been a bad summer for the elm. Driving across southern England, wherever there is elm, there are the tell-tale signs of attack by the elm bark beetle with shriveled brown leaves and bent-over branches standing out against the green hedge background. Semington was not completely free from this recent attack; from being green and healthy-looking in May and June, during July and August at least some of the elm in the village gradually fell victim to the fungus the beetle carries. To try to stop the fungus spreading, the tree blocks the vessels within the wood that carry water and nutrient through up trunk, and this causes tissues to die. So, just when the elm was fighting back, it’s had another knock, and the cycle of attack – recovery – attack – recovery … continues. Curiously, however, this is not so much a story of decline, as one of survival. We have not seen the last of the elm.

Elm wood is strong, durable and resistant to water. Traditionally it was used to make furniture, floorboards, boats, wheel hubs, water pipes, troughs, coffins and lavatory seats. Odd then, perhaps, that it has a reputation for not generating much heat as this old rhyme reminds us: